Window Peeping

March 18 --  Tonight, we drove Connor home from a lacrosse team bonding event at a local healthclub.  He had a couple of friends in the car along with a neighborhood boy whose mom had emailed me in the beginning of the week to ask if we could give him a ride home.  I laughed when I read the email because it is a known fact on our street that they all go to bed really, really early.  I just figured she was looking for an easy out so she wouldn't have to stay up late on a Friday night.

So I teased N about it in the car.  I was like, "oh, your mom just wanted to go to bed early, I know."  And he said, "nooo, I think she was going to a meeting for my sister."  I told him I was just teasing.  He laughed and then acknowledged that in fact, they do all go to bed early.  We talked about how this makes a lot of sense because his dad, who is in construction, has to get up really early in the morning.  "How do you know their lights are out?" asked Connor.  "Why are you staring at the neighbor's houses?"

I thought about that for a moment.  I do have the habit of looking inside people's houses at night when we are driving by.  Not intently really, but if I am in the passenger side of the car (which is where I often am when we are driving late at night), I will certainly observe and make note of the room colors, the tv layout, the lighting.  I know rooms in certain homes that have gone from blah cream to bold red.  From light colors to neon yellows.  Or rooms that just don't work with night lighting;  they are too crazy.  I wonder if the owners are able to relax in there.  Or if they avoid the room.  It's the interior decorator in me, I can't help it.  Does that make me bad?  A peeping Tom?  I don't think so.  I just like to make up stories about the people in the homes, that's all.  And give them silent suggestions.  Maybe it's weird, but it's not like I go creeping back later at night with a step stool in hand to climb up and look in the window.  It's a drive-by snapshot I take with my mind  to briefly leave the world I am in and to momentarily live in someone else's life -- I just love seeing how other people decorate.  And then my mind wanders, fills in the details.  And then...in the flash of a second, or two, or three, we have moved past the house and I am suddenly back in my own very full, very real world.